Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
The Neural Archive is a repository of publications collected by us during the years. Browse our collection here.
Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.
Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.
YesNo by Timo Kahlen feels like “traditional” net art, a well crafted stuck webpage for the user’s aural and clickable enjoyment.
The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”
Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400
GoPro ancestors in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly sport and movie persons like F1 driver Jackie Stewart, Bob Sinclair and Steve McQueen.
Reproposing an ironic vision of an out of fashion past is one of the prerogatives of videogames, which have the possibility to recreate historic systems through simulations and keep afloat memories which the fury of information mass media tends to submerge instantly. Soviet-Unterzögersdorf is the unpronounceable title of a videogame made by the austrian group of activists-technophilosophers Monochrom. Unterzögersdorf is the last satellite country of the soviet bloc, a tiny country in the middle of Austria which is still faithful to the theory and practice of real socialism. Impersonating the secretary of the party Vladislav, the player must defend the scarce supplies and repel the western cultural invasion, which takes the form of gangs of young heavy-metal fans. After a disquieting introduction, the style of the game is the same of a LucasArts graphic adventure: in the words of the authors themselves, “it was clear that an almost extinct form of computer game would provide the perfect media platform to communicate the idea of Soviet-Unterzögersdorf”. The retro and decaying atmosphere permeates every screen, the dialogues and monologues are only in russian (subtitled in german or english) and the soundtrack is composed of stately hymns broadcasted by the local radio. Everywhere, the bleakness and desolation of a collapsed economy. The humour is cruel. Comrade Vladislav never loses an occasion to show his rhetoric, praising his beloved country, quoting passages from The Capital and coping perfectly with the absurd bureaucratic system of the village. The postmodern pastiche on the peculiar soviet computing machinery is wonderful: there are a virtual reality machine running on plutonium, a mysterious “godless machine” and many other such things. With a soundtrack that includes songs by Negativland and Jazz Dance Combinat, Soviet-Unterzögersdorf is very worth the time spent playing it, but is just the first chapter of a trilogy yet to be completed and, even if can be downloaded and played for free, the authors welcome donations through PayPal to fund the development. The game (for Windows, Linux and MacOSX) is released under a Creative Commons license.
Paolo Pedercini
